What would make it “it” for you? Is there a specific feature(s) you think is missing?

Thank you! Nice to hear this makes sense to someone other than myself :)

> Curious which has been the better wedge so far: bringing existing groups and their members over, or creating new local connections through individual activity posts?

I'll have to get back to you on that hah! I've only launched the activities this week, so we shall see!

Maybe! Or maybe there's more going on than you know about? A meetup I regularly attend now existed in my city for 9 years before I found out about it - they just had no good way to advertise themselves easily.

> Eg meetup at least has critical mass of users and meetups

It definitely does. That's part of why I've made the Activity [1] feature - to give individual users something useful to do even before we have that critical mass of established groups.

[1] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity

The sign-up form only asks for name, email, password and a pre-filled location - there's some quick "Interests" selection after that, but I felt it was fairly easy/quick to fill out. Maybe I could move that out of the sign-up.

Which part specifically felt too complicated? I'll revisit it and see if there's anything else I can shave off or make it smoother!

Yeah, I don't disagree! In a way, I'm trying to combat that by facilitating people actually getting together in the real world, through events, activities and shared interests. I've deliberately not allowed free-form text posts or DMs between users, so it doesn't just turn into another social media feed.

> why would someone switch from direct communication (WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups..etc)

Yup, I think it depends on the size and nature of the group. A meetup between friends probably doesn't need a web presence at all, and WhatsApp would be perfectly adequate.

For larger clubs or public groups that want to attract new people, though, there's value in having somewhere discoverable with proper event pages, recurring events, RSVPs, waitlists, calendars, etc., so that's who this is for.

So I think Luma is mostly focused on beautiful event pages (which they do well) and event calendars rather than the community/group itself being the core unit. In that way, we're more of a competitor to Meetup.com. I don't think a local cycling club would use Luma to organise a weekly cycle, for example.

Compared with Meetup, I'm trying to keep Radius a bit simpler and more flexible for organisers. Pricing is a flat £12/month for Pro groups, and things like our Events API [1], embeddable event widgets [2], calendar subscriptions, guest RSVPs and waitlists are all available for free groups as well.

There's also the Activities [3] feature I mentioned - not super applicable to you if you're an organiser but regular users might find it useful. You don't need to create or run a group at all and can just say "I'm going cycling Saturday, anyone want to join?" and see who nearby is interested. AFAIK, I don't think Meetup or Luma etc have anything like this.

[1] https://radius.to/documentation/api-reference/create-events

[2] https://radius.to/documentation/organizer-tools/embed-widget

[3] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity

I'm relaunching Radius [1] - far too long after the original Show HN [2] (I'll blame the day job for that).

Radius started out from my frustration with not knowing what was going on around me. The initial plan was to "show all and every type of event" from big to small, but over time I narrowed the focus to communities, groups, events, and helping people connect through them.

The initial Show HN gave me 150+ comments (surprising, looking back, given how terrible the plain Bootstrap UI was...) with a huge amount of useful feedback and feature requests. I've spent the time since then working through that, along with additional requests from groups using Radius, and it finally feels ready for a proper relaunch.

I've also recently added "Activities" [3] - which are lightweight events, independent of groups, intended to help people find others to do things with - for example:

> John is going for a cycle and a coffee in New York at 10am

People can join and vote for a time that works for them.

I've got a bunch of ideas for where to go next with this, including things like open sourcing and federation, but those are for another day!

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

P.S. it's built with Ruby on Rails, for those interested. I highly suspect it would have taken me 2 more years to get to this point without Rails!

[1] https://radius.to/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

[3] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49777539

Points: 78

# Comments: 34

Recently shipped lightweight events called activities, to allow people to meet each other more easily through things they're doing - i.e. "John is going for a cycle tomorrow".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

I posted a Show HN [1] here a while back, got tons of great feedback, and have been slowly improving it since, with no real marketing. Another Show HN is probably (definitely) overdue!

Current focus is shipping a "Meet people doing X" feature - i.e. "I'm going for a cycle today in Richmond Park - who wants to join" (independent from groups) so I'm excited for that. There are some UI examples of how that will look on the landing page.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

I posted a Show HN [1] here a while back, got tons of great feedback, and have been slowly improving it since, with no real marketing. Another Show HN is probably overdue!

More recently, I've been working on adding features around meeting individuals/smaller impromptu groups over activities you're doing - i.e. "I'm going for a cycle today - who wants to join", so I'm excited to see how that goes. There are some UI examples from that on the landing page.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

And thanks for the tips - I completely agree on the point about data being held hostage, and on the openness of data - it's one of the more frequent complaints about Meetup. I've recently added an API for event creation, so it won't be hard to add another endpoint for listings (at the moment, we just have an embeddable widget [1] showing your next 3 events).

ICAL is a brilliant suggestion - I've had a few requests for that already, and it's especially interesting in the context of opentechcalendar. I'm very interested in ActivityPub and all things fediverse as well - figuring out how to integrate these ideas into the platform is one of the next items on my TODO list.

[1] https://radius.to/blog/embed-events-widget-website

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

It's intended to be a sort of social network focused on IRL groups/communities and finding others with the same interests in the same area, and just building local communities in general.

It's currently still a part-time venture, but I'm planning a launch on HN soon to get input/gauge interest in the latest iteration. FWIW, I posted the initial version on HN just over a year ago and got a ton of amazing feedback, much of which I've incorporated over the last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

I'd imagine you'd get pretty good results on both ProductHunt and Reddit as well if you can get enough upvotes, though the latter is pretty difficult to promote your products on these days unless it's legitimately relevant to the community you post in.

Yep, exactly! I've been trying to find a better term than "event" or "activity" for "things to do" or "things happening around you", but I think these phrases are the best I'll get. That's part of the problem with Meetup - it's fine(ish) for finding events of a certain type but there's so much other stuff that's not on there.

If you're looking for a way to fill the month ahead, or your weekend with stuff to do, you have to scout the info from tons of separate sources.

Thanks, that'd be awesome!

And that sounds like most of the experiences I've heard - their pricing options really aren't great.

> Once I started posting meetups, though, I started getting a lot of bogus signups. They were clearly bogus, as many had nothing to do with tech, or were unreasonably far away (like New Jersey or Upstate). I suspect most, if not all, were fake profiles. These signups filled the meetups, so I would get like, one real person showing up. All the rest were no-shows.

I know no-shows are a big problem but spam/fake sign-ups - that's a weird one, and not one I'd considered! Was this recently? I'd assume something like this would have been easy to fix by requiring email confirmation on your account sign-up.